PrintFebruary 7, 2007
IPCC's cloudy forecast
The bold assurances of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that their predictions are 90% sure should give the layman pause. "If it sounds too good to be true..." John Fialka of the Wall Street Journal uncovered an interesting admission from Tom Delworth, a climate modeler for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency in charge of climate science and weather service.
"But, so far, the supercomputers the agency uses to model the effect on the earth's climate -- which were also used for the IPCC report -- aren't detailed or fast enough to predict how much clouds are accelerating the problem. Mr. Delworth said computer models divide the earth's oceans and atmosphere into four million boxes, each about 150 square miles, and that these boxes are too large to model the effects of clouds."We could use computers that are one million times faster than they are today and still not be satisfied," Mr. Delworth said.Further complicating the issue are layers of haze containing pollutants from human activity. Such pollutants, including sulfates, soot, dust and nitrates, tend to make the atmosphere brighter, reflecting more of the sun's heat back into space. The IPCC has found that the net effect of the added pollution is to cool the atmosphere."
So the models the panel used to make their predictions are not anywhere near being capable of predicting the effects of clouds. Clouds are a key component of surface temperatures. Being able to handle the effects of clouds must be evident to even laymen. consider that even the most basic weather prediction takes the form of temperature and cloud cover (e.g. - sunny, partly cloudy, overcast, rainy etc.)". Considering the earth's surface is two-thirds water and warming would increase evaporation, it follows that global warming would affect cloud formation. So how does the panel arrive at a 90% certainty for their predictions?
I see group think here, reminiscent of "Nuclear Winter", the first political battle over global climate change. The NOAA "experts" asserted that an increased global cloud bank would lead to a Nuclear Winter, now increased clouds will lead to Global Warming.
The question to ask these experts is "Were you wrong then or are you wrong now?"
